Pricing John the Lydian, De Mensibus

I got hold of the 1898 text of John the Lydian and did some calculations. There seem to be about 7 words per line, about 26 lines per page, and 177 pages of text. That comes out at 32,214 words, which is probably a fair-ish estimate of how long the text is.

If I were to pay someone 10 cents a word to translate it, that would be $3,222. I don’t have any such sum to spare, so I won’t do so. But it’s interesting. To a corporation such sums are almost petty cash.